One for One (John Flynn Thrillers Book 3)

by A. J. Stewart

  “Can we get tickets?” asked Flynn.

  “I have two. Hospitality suites. They cost a bomb.”

  “You can afford it.”

  Flynn watched the men wandering into the stadium together and then met Gorski out front. They handed over tickets and took an elevator up to the hospitality level of the presidential stand. An usher showed them to their suite. It was a small space with a bar and a table for food, and seating to eat or chat. All the seats were taken.

  “What company is this?” Flynn asked.

  “I don’t think it’s one business. Although most of the boxes are, I think this one is shared by smaller companies who can’t afford a full season.”

  They were offered beer and champagne but took Perrier and then wandered out the sliding doors at the end of the suite. They were about three quarters of the way up the stand. Below them was a section of stadium seats just for their use. Either side of them were similar suites with the same seating. Their suite was toward one of the goal lines, where a 22 was marked on the grass.

  “Any idea which one Loup is in?” asked Gorski.

  “The one on the halfway line. The best position.”

  Flynn stepped down to the end of the sectioned off area and looked along the stand, seeing no sign of Loup. Most of the seats in front of the corporate boxes were empty. Corporate people were enjoying the hospitality inside.

  “Let’s take a seat here,” he said. “He might come out when the game starts.”

  The stadium was about half-full. The scoreboard told them that the match was between Stade Français and Brive. The teams ran out to muted applause and then the ground announcer started up. At kickoff most of the corporate seats were still empty. Flynn figured they could see the game from inside, through the sliding doors, and not have to move far from the free food and drinks. He didn’t see the point. The atmosphere was outside. There was a buzz around the stadium that he recalled from attended football games in Belgium. If he was inside he might as well have been at home watching on TV.

  Some corporates moved outside by the ten minute mark. Each team had kicked a field goal and been awarded three points for it. Flynn watched the stand as much as the game. Then he saw Loup. He was sitting in the back row of the section in front of his box, right on the halfway line of the field. Pierre Robert stepped out with a beer and sat on the far side of him. And then a third man came out. He was different. He was healthy enough but a little more jowly around the jaw, and his hair had packed up and left some years ago. He took a seat next to Loup. They were talking and Flynn was watching the back of the third man’s head. Then there was a break in the play, and a Stade Français player carrying the ball burst through the Brive defense, and the crowd cheered and the third man looked toward the field.

  It was Alain Beaumont. Loup’s college friend. So the three links of the chain were not only theoretical, but they were at the rugby together. Flynn nudged Gorski who seemed wrapped up in the game and directed his attention.

  “Beaumont?”

  Flynn nodded.

  “So Loup is the next link.”

  “Maybe. Not for certain. But the odds are shortening.”

  The local team went into half time with a 10-3 lead, and the corporates retreated into their boxes and the rest of the crowd retreated into the stands, all looking for toilets and food and drink.

  Loup remained in his seat. Beaumont went inside. One of Loup’s security detail brought him a beer, which he thanked the man for. As play began everyone’s attention turned back to the field, more so when Brive scored a try in the first minutes to even the scores. But Flynn watched the crowd. A few were cheering, mostly on their side of the stadium. It was a home town crowd. Heads were shaking and beer was being drunk and tactics were being discussed.

  Then Flynn saw the woman. There were a surprising number of women at the game, despite there being almost none in the corporate boxes. But this women was different. Not just different from other women, but different from everyone else in the stadium. She wasn’t discussing tactics or cheering. She wasn’t even looking at the field. She was looking the other way. Into the stands.

  Directly at Jean Loup.

  Chapter Nine

  Flynn watched the woman. She wasn’t trying too hard to hide. Occasionally she turned and glanced at the field, but every few minutes she looked back up at the box Loup was in. At least the angle looked right from Flynn’s position. Parallax error might have meant she was looking at the next box along, watching her ex-husband or a lover. She scanned along the boxes and her eyes passed over where Flynn and Gorski were sitting. She didn’t stop, continuing on to the end of the stand and then back again. At one point she took out a camera. It was a Canon DSLR, with a decent lens, maybe 300mm. Not subtle at all. She snapped pictures of the corporate box above her. Then she sat back down and watched the play.

  He wanted to know exactly what she was looking at, so Flynn walked up the steps into the hospitality box and then down the concrete stairs to the ground level. There were bars and food outlets. Flynn passed them by and walked out into the stand. He moved along the walkway to where the woman was sitting, but she was gone. He looked around and didn’t see her, so he looked up, estimating her previous position and angle.

  Flynn was looking directly at Jean Loup. He was deep in discussion with someone Flynn didn’t recognize. Then Flynn caught the look of one of the security detail. He wore a black coat and stood back against the sliding door into the corporate box. He was watching Flynn. Copying what the woman had done, Flynn glanced along the row of glass-fronted boxes until his eyes fell on Gorski, who was also watching him, and he nodded as if he had found where he needed to be. Then he stepped away, back into the concourse below the stand, and up and back to the shared corporate box.

  “Something?” asked Gorski as Flynn sat down.

  “A woman. Watching Loup.”

  “Where?”

  “She’s gone.”

  The man standing by the sliding door crouched down by the seats in front and spoke to the his boss who sitting in front of him.

  “The woman is here, Monsieur Loup.”

  “Watching?”

  “Oui, and she was at La Defense today.”

  “She’s fishing, Thierry. If she was serious she’d be working at Le Monde, not unemployed.”

  “Of course.”

  “All the same, don’t let her in the building.”

  “That’s already done.”

  They didn’t stay for the end of the game. Flynn and Gorski were both perched on the small moped when the van pulled up in front of the gate and Loup got in. A security guy closed the door and the van pulled away, leaving Robert and Beaumont standing by themselves. A black SUV pulled up and Robert got in.

  “The van,” said Gorski, and Flynn motored away after it. The moped wasn’t designed for two and it struggled under the weight, but the journey back to Avenue Montaigne wasn’t a long one. The driver took the route along the river, the Eiffel Tower on the other bank lit up in the night sky. The van pulled onto Rue Marbeuf and then cut a hard right into Rue de Marignan where the gate to Loup’s courtyard was no doubt opening as if by magic. Flynn stopped on Avenue des Champs-Élysées and watched the van disappear into the courtyard, then he turn a U-turn at the traffic circle and headed back out of town.

  Flynn left the moped where he had found it, beside an apartment building a block from their hotel. He tucked a fifty euro note into the seat and then they walked back to the hotel. The old guy sat behind the desk watching football. They had paid him cash that morning for another night, so he paid no attention to them.

  Once in the room they each sat on the bed. They had eaten at the stadium. They didn’t care that the food was free. That wasn’t the point. But both men had spent enough time in hard places, in deserts and war-torn cities, watching and waiting and not leaving for weeks at a time. They both took the opportunity to eat when the food was available. Most people took their food supply for granted. Not men who ha
d marched hundreds of kilometers on empty stomachs across hot, barren deserts.

  “So, what do we know?” asked Gorski.

  “The tower is hard.”

  “Oui.”

  “The house is hard.”

  “Oui.”

  “The rugby stadium would be easy to take him out, but we want to talk to him first. So it’s hard as well.”

  “Oui.”

  “We need to know more about his movements. His routine. Guys like this, they move around, always busy, seemingly pulled in a thousand directions. But even if that is the case on a macro level, they always have order at a micro level. Like an army. It doesn’t work any other way. He has his routines. We have to learn them.”

  “It might take time,” said Gorski.

  “We have time. That’s always the key. We have to have more time than they do.”

  “Unless the guys visit my mother again.”

  “You need to keep in touch with her. If they reappear before we’re done here, we’ll go back. And we’ll wait for them. We’ll finish them. Then we’ll come back and wait here.”

  Gorski nodded.

  Then each washed their face in the basin and removed their boots and socks and lay clothed on their beds. Like food, sleep was something to be taken when it was on offer, for tomorrow there might not be any. So they slept.

  The next morning was clear, just a smear of cloud in the sky and no rain in sight. So it was cold. Gorski wrapped his new silk scarf around his face and Flynn flicked up his collar. They walked away from the station toward a large apartment building and found a communal parking area. Gorski asked that they find something a little bigger than the previous moped. Flynn found a dusty old scooter designed to carry two people. The dust suggested it hadn’t been ridden in a while, which lessened the chances of the owner missing it. He unscrewed the front casing and rejigged the wiring and then kick started the bike.

  “You didn’t learn that in the Legion,” said Gorski.

  “Actually I learned from a sergeant in Israel.”

  Once at La Defense, they took it in turns to rotate positions. One on the granite bench and wandering around the plaza, the other sitting on the moped opposite the garage entrance. Loup’s black van arrived at the same time it had the previous day—straight in and under. A helicopter arrived at noon and landed on the roof, then it left at two. Nothing happened for the next few hours. People walked in and out of Loup Tower, around the plaza. Cars and trucks drove by the garage. No more helicopters, no sign of Loup. Gorski and Flynn waited. They we good at it. Like anything, they had not been good at it at first, but then they had done it, a lot of it, and they had gotten good. It was like a submarine, shutting everything down but the essential components. Eyes and ears and oxygen. Almost trance like.

  At 4:03 p.m. the garage door opened and the van came out. Gorski was on the scooter. Flynn was on the granite bench. Gorski called it in. They had already agreed a plan. Whoever was on the moped would follow. The other couldn’t get over there in time, so they would follow in a cab. If they could.

  Gorski followed the van north along the River Seine. It wasn’t easy making a call while riding, especially without a headset, so he kept his updates short.

  “North along Seine,” he said.

  After about ten minutes they cut across the river at Saint Denis and he called that in. They passed the huge Stade de France and then the van cut across to the A1 freeway, otherwise known as the autoroute du nord. There was no calling it in, though. The van sped up and it was all Gorski could do to keep it in sight. He wasn’t even sure if the little bike was legal on an autoroute. Trucks and cars sped by, buffeting him on the tiny scooter. He figure with four minutes the van would be lost to him. Then he would call it in.

  But the just as it got away, the van got off. It pulled off the exit and instantly Gorski knew where they were going. He waited until he got onto a surface street to call it in.

  “Le Bourget airport,” he said.

  The van drove along Route de l’Europe by the airport, past a retro-looking terminal and an aerospace museum. It came to a row of hangers, three stories high, that were on the other side of the security fence. They looked big enough to be soundstages on a movie backlot. The van slowed and then stopped by an intercom, and then a gate opened and the van drove in.

  Gorski slowed. The van parked outside one of the hangars. The road between the hangars ended at another security fence, beyond which Gorski could see the airfield. He watched two security men step out of the van, followed by Jean Loup, followed by another security man. All of them strode into the hangar.

  Pulling the moped forward in a parking space just off the road, Gorski called Flynn.

  “Private hangars at Le Bourget,” he said.

  “I’m five minutes out.”

  It was four minutes. The taxi pulled over and Flynn stepped out and handed the driver some cash. As the taxi drove on, Flynn glanced in at the parked van.

  “Where’s he going, I wonder.”

  Gorski shrugged. “No idea. But this could be a weak point.”

  “An airport? How do you figure?”

  “It’s not Charles De Gaulle or Orly. This is a small airfield. For executive jets. I bet he has his own aircraft in there,” he said, pointing at the hangar.

  “You think we could get in and wait for him to come back?”

  “The thought had occurred.”

  “He has security. There’ll be collateral damage.”

  “They’re not collateral damage,” said Gorski. “You know that what innocents are, and the security detail isn’t that. They chose a side.”

  “It’s the service staff I’m concerned about.”

  Gorski nodded.

  “There’s not a lot to see here. Let’s see if we can find a spot to scope out the aircraft.”

  “End of the runway.” Gorski looked at the sky. “With this breeze, they’ll be taking off to the north-east.”

  Gorski drove and Flynn hung on. They continued along the airport road, beyond another private terminal building and flight support service companies, until they got to the end of the airfield and turned left. At the end of the runway, on the far side of the road was a petrol station and a warehouse for a logistics company. Flynn saw rows of semitrailers lined up. On the airport side of the logistics warehouse was a grass berm, right where the runway would have continued if it went another 500 meters. Flynn assumed it was designed as a sound barrier against the accelerating aircraft taking off overhead.

  What it created was the perfect spot for a plane spotter. And there were a few. About a half dozen people had parked along the road and set up camp chairs on top of the berm. As Gorski slowed the scooter Flynn looked at the small group. Some were jotting notes in books and others were looking through field glasses at the airport. Flynn knew every airport had it’s community of aircraft aficionados, otherwise known as plane spotters. Some frequented the big commercial airports, but the real diehards watched the comings and goings of the smaller airfields, especially the ones where private jets came in. They took down aircraft tail numbers, sizes and colors. They knew the types of engines in each aircraft, and whether the Gulfstream G550 or the Bombardier Global Express had the better fuel economy. They were a wealth of information, and usually keen to talk.

  As Gorski began to pull off the road Flynn slapped his back.

  “Go, go, go,” he said into Gorski’s ear.

  Gorski hit the throttle and zoomed back onto the road and then went another 500 meters farther. Flynn said it okay so Gorski slowed and pulled over onto the grass. From their position they couldn’t see the runway, or the hangars on the far side, where Loup had gone.

  “What was that about?” Gorski asked.

  Flynn got off the scooter. “She was there. On the berm.”

  “Who?”

  “The woman from last night at the game.”

  “The one watching Loup?”

  “The same.”

  “Who the hell is she
?”

  “No idea. But I’m wondering if she’s part of the security detail.”

  “How would that work?”

  “He has close protection, we know that. But heads of state, like the president, they have close and distant protection. The bodyguards who will take a bullet, and other guys further out. Snipers, agents in the crowd, that kind of thing.”

  “You think she was photographing her own man? That doesn’t make sense.”

  “It might have been cover. Acting like a tourist or something. Either way, she’s up on that hill.”

  “All right, let’s say it’s the same woman. Does she know us? Unlikely.”

  “But possible. So let’s tread carefully.”

  They left the scooter running. Without the key they had to flood the engine to stop it, and while that worked fine before a long stakeout, they weren’t planning on staying all day at the end of the runway at Le Bourget. If they needed to leave they needed the thing to be running.

  They stepped back along the road, across the entrance road to the logistics company and along the bottom of the berm, to where the line of cars belonging to the plane spotters began. They heard the massive engines of a jet aircraft roar, and the pitch rise and then the long, bullet-like aircraft launch into the air right over their heads. The sound was tremendous, and they felt the air pressure change in their ears for a second.

  “Gulfstream 280.”

  Flynn and Gorski both looked at a beat up old Opel hatchback. A man with a walrus mustache sat in the drivers seat.

  “Cruising speed of 850 kilometers per hour,” he continued. “Range of over 6,000 kilometers. You could fly to New York in that one. Chicago maybe, but you’d be on fumes.”

  Flynn nodded. “That so.”

  The guy nodded as if it was so, and then bit into a sandwich.

  “You don’t watch from the berm?” Flynn asked the guy.

  “Of course. But we’re about to lose the sun.”

  Flynn glanced at Gorski and then back to the man.